The glee with which I watched the Croatian team beat back the Russians from victory last Saturday cannot begin to be measured. Think of poor Dawn Sturgess, surely not the first victim of Russian aggression in our country of this decade or the last, but also think of the doping and of the threat to the integrity of our democracy. It meant far more to me than England’s 2-0 win against Sweden—as great as that was—because it showed that fascist kleptocracy does not (always) pay.

You may say I’m being mean spirited: “What of the Russian people, and of the players? Surely they cannot be blamed for the excesses of their government?” And I reply: What? Did the players think the pills they were being given are vitamins? And do the Russian people not realise the ridiculously high approval ratings they are giving to their tyrant?

5. The Russian Embassy

The Russian Embassy staff in the Netherlands are now so far gone they seem to be not just attempting to just deny any new attack in Salisbury, but they seem to be attempting to deny the existence of Novichok at all, even though it’s history is openly well-documented. As to giving the OPCW “attribution functions”, what they essentially did was confirm British findings for the world.

The Russian Embassy staff in South Africa however are going for a different approach: Porton Down dun it.

You may be forgiven for at first thinking that information coordination within the Russian diplomatic service may have broken down, but such a scattershot of conspiracy theories being shotgunned out all at once is exactly in line with the Russian disinformation strategy of last March. The goal here is not to promote an alternate vision of reality, but to undermine the idea of a single consensual reality at all.

However, even Russian Embassy staff are not the worst victims of their own psyche on the new attacks this week, as we’ll see…

4. Ron Paul

Bull. Shit. “Inadvertently”? How can you post this inadvertently?

Maybe Paul could be given the benefit of the doubt if only:

The exact same tweet hadn’t been posted with the exact same text immediately after, which still contains the Alt-Right meme of “Cultural Marxism” (do I even need to say who they really mean?).

People often look to people like Richard Spencer or Paul Gottfried as the progenitors of the American Alt-Right, but really Paul has been the open godfather all along.

3. Jeremy Corbyn

can keep saying it my dear Jezza, but the psephological numbers just don’t add up:

According to figures from YouGov regarding 2017 voters, only 42% of C2DE voters voted for Labour, less than that of the 44% for the Tories. Even just for DE voters the difference was only 3% more in favour for Labour, which when you include a standard margin (typically running from 2 to 4%) makes the vote for both essentially equal.

More recent polling from YouGov from early last month suggests that this has got worse, with 48% of C2DE potential voters indicating a Tory vote, while only 37% indicating a Labour vote (a 9% drop from last January).

Yeah, I mean, what idiot would call that poison “Novichok”, aside from…well, you:

So, it’s from the “Novichok family of agents”, but it’s not Novichok?

You can even begin with this level of stupid…

That article linked by Simon Long by the way mentions nothing about a “family of agents”, but instead quotes the OPCW statement "confirm[ing] the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity of the toxic chemical that was used in Salisbury and severely injured three people. "It also quotes: “the toxic chemical was of high purity. The latter is concluded from the almost complete absence of impurities."

1. Chris Williamson

Williamson is now so contemptuous of his followers he will just tweet anything with a comment that says whatever ever is ideologically convenient for him, regardless of the actual content.

What the statement posted by the OPCW says is “that no organophosphorous nerve agents or their degradation products were detected in the environmental samples or in the plasma samples taken from alleged casualties.” HOWEVER: “Along with explosive residues, various chlorinated organic chemicals were found in samples from two sites, for which there is full chain of custody.” The presence of chlorine elements fits in with reports by residents of Douma at the time: "All of a sudden some gas spread around us[.] We couldn't breathe, it smelled like chlorine."

The research of the team is still on-going: “Work by the team to establish the significance of these results is on-going. The FFM team will continue its work to draw final conclusions.”

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